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By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

Barry Commoner

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Recycling Substance
What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point – the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Need Powerful
All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
BARRY COMMONER

Clean Known Technology
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
BARRY COMMONER

Light Tunnels Way
The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Suicidal Warning
The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
BARRY COMMONER

Air Epa Method Progress
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
BARRY COMMONER

Earth Day Environmental Survival
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.
BARRY COMMONER

Achievement Air Cities
It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
BARRY COMMONER

Inheritance Law Technology
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER

Apprentice Modern Technology
Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Lunch Nature
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
BARRY COMMONER

Approach Impossible Zero
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
BARRY COMMONER

Art Law Medicine
The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.
BARRY COMMONER

Gaps Needs Technology
No action is without its side effects.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Effect Sides
The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Meaningful Powerful Quality
Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.
BARRY COMMONER

Entering Environmental Quality Simple
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.—->I dont believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together.
BARRY COMMONER

Believe Environmentalism Law Together
The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
BARRY COMMONER

Army Command Scientist
As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.
BARRY COMMONER

Doctors Teacher Views
Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.
BARRY COMMONER

Differences Feel Good People
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental War Years
The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
BARRY COMMONER

Crisis Environmental Signal
My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Issues Links
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
BARRY COMMONER

Irrational Reason Shirts
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Animal Law Nature
In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Risk Running

By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

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By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

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Popular Authors

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